LATIN 7272

Graduate Seminar in Latin

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2023-2024.

An American scholar once described Aeneid 7-12 as the "Other Aeneid," the Italian phase of Virgil's regeneration of the Aeneas tradition which brings the hero into the context of what Virgil himself concedes is the dimly remembered world that Livy attempts to reconstruct in his history. Most of the cast of characters the poet arrays in support of, and in opposition to, Aeneas as he attempts to gain his promised kingdom would have been almost as unfamiliar to ancient as to modern readers. Virgil's reconstructions, Mezentius, for example, are often very different from representation in other ancient accounts, such as that of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Others are largely his inventions. The most familiar holdover from the Homeric tradition is Diomedes, Aeneas' opponent in Iliad 5, and the first Greek warrior named by Aeneas himself in Virgil's epic, who is approached by Aeneas' delegates, but eventually decides not to join the battle. This seminar will explore what the last six books tell us of Virgil's design for the epic as a whole.

When Offered Spring.

Permission Note Enrollment limited to: graduate students.

Comments Historians, literary critics, and students of Roman philosophy or pre-Roman Italy welcome.

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